Latin Love Poetry Read online

  As his work developed, Propertius clearly altered the overall themes and methods of his poetry. The changes in Propertius’ fourth and final book are perhaps the most dramatic, involving Propertius’ partial turn from amatory poetry to the political form of poetry he earlier seemed to disavow. The shift between Book 1 (known as the ‘Monobiblos’) and Book 2 is also noteworthy, even though interpretation of Book 2 is hampered by serious textual problems.45 Generally speaking, the realism that seems to define Book 1’s account of Propertius’ erotic adventures gives way in Book 2 to greater interest in the process of literary production itself, documenting Propertius’ growing self-consciousness about the demands of both literary genre and the new Augustan era. While Propertius’ poetry continues to treat a number of literary and political questions in Book 3, if Ovid’s later recollection of Propertius ‘singing his fires’ (Tristia 4.10.45–46) is any indication, his poems portraying Cynthia were already the most popular part of his corpus at the time of his death.

  Ovid: The Teacher of Playful Love

  Ovid was born on 20 March 43 BCE in the city of Sulmona (in what is today the region of Abruzzo); like Tibullus and Propertius, he belonged to a prosperous family of equestrian rank. Only twelve at the time of Actium, Ovid is often considered the most solidly Augustan of all poets of this period in his point of view. After receiving a thorough education, Ovid eventually abandoned his political career and turned to poetry as his primary occupation. In 8 CE, at the height of his prosperity, Ovid was mysteriously and unexpectedly exiled (or relegated) to the Black Sea, to the region of Tomi (today’s Constanța in Romania), an event we shall discuss in greater detail in Chapter 6. Ovid died in exile in 17 or 18 CE.

  Among the Augustan elegists, Ovid was the most prolific, experimenting with a range of literary genres over the course of his life. Ovid’s first work of elegies, the Amores, was published in five books some time after 20 BCE and then in three books during its second edition between 7 BCE and 1 CE.46 After the Amores, Ovid published the Epistulae Heroidum (Letters of Heroines), also known as the Heroides, a work in elegiac couplets that artfully combines the theme of love with Ovid’s extensive knowledge of classical mythology. Ovid also wrote a now-lost tragedy Medea, which enjoyed great success. Elegy, however, remained a lasting interest and Ovid later produced the Ars Amatoria, the poem that may have contributed to his exile, and then the Remedia Amoris and the Medicamina Faciei Femineae (The Cosmetics of Women), in which he inverted and even mocked the conventions of the elegiac genre.

  Ovid’s lofty poetic aspirations are especially apparent in his attempt at epic poetry in the Metamorphoses, a poem in fifteen books in dactylic hexameter, written between 2 and 8 CE. This work was followed by the Fasti, a verse version of the Roman calendar in which Ovid once again employed the elegiac couplet. Ovid’s Fasti notably followed the example of Propertius’ Book 4 in using the elegiac metre to treat serious, even civic themes. The years of exile returned Ovid to elegy as a means for expressing his personal anguish. In Tomi, lonely and sad, Ovid penned two melancholy poems Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), which obliquely and vaguely mention his transgressions and openly beg for Augustus’ mercy. Ibis – an invective poem named after a bird and modelled on the lost poem of the same name by Callimachus – was most likely Ovid’s last work penned in 11–12 CE.

  As these short biographies suggest, the tumultuous political events of the first century had a manifest impact on our poets’ lives; does their literary work accordingly express their individual views of the emerging Augustan era and its princeps?

  Pro- or Anti-Augustan?

  Writing some twenty to thirty years before the rise of Augustus, Catullus uses his poetry at times to present a lively critique of prominent contemporary political figures. He pens a number of vicious attacks against both Julius Caesar (e.g. 29 and 93) and various individuals associated with Caesar such as Mamurra, the governor of Gaul, whom Catullus refers to by the pseudonym ‘prick’ (mentula) in a number of epigrams (29, 94, 105, 114 and 115). In poem 10, Catullus complains about the stinginess of the praetor – a type of Roman magistrate – Memmius, whom he served under in Bithynia;47 later, in poem 28, he asks whether his friends Veranius and Fabullus have received any profit from their similar service under Piso,48 eventually pronouncing the verdict that Piso and Memmius are a ‘disgrace’ to Romulus and Remus (15). To paraphrase Catullus’ general feeling: everyone working for the Roman government eventually gets screwed.

  While Catullus’ attacks are titillating for modern readers, they may have seemed fairly unexceptional during a time when cutting political rhetoric was par for the course.49 Caesar may have been stung by the ferocity of Catullus’ verbal assault, but according to Tacitus he managed to ignore Catullus’ insults and, according to Suetonius, Caesar even sought out Catullus’ company (Tacitus, Annales 4.34.8; Suetonius, Julius 73).50 Unlike Catullus, Augustan authors faced the increasing consolidation of power in the hands of a single leader, and modern scholars have often devoted considerable energy to determining the precise ‘politics’ of literature from this era, asking whether a particular work or author should be considered ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-Augustan’, a question that can be illuminating in some respects, but also at times reductive and simplistic.51

  J.P. Sullivan, for example, argues that Propertius is at one point ‘subtly but unmistakably critical’ of the ‘imperial conquest and further wars, which were so much in the air at the time of his writing’;52 yet elsewhere in his work Propertius presents the Augustan city and its princeps more positively. Miller captures well the potential duality in Propertian thought (i.e. Propertius’ ability to be both ‘pro-’ and ‘anti-Augustan’) when he proposes that in certain poems Propertius ‘displays newfound closeness with the imperial regime and a refusal of its embrace’,53 a stance that may characterize many Augustan artists. In this way, although we may think that we are doing an ‘obvious and straightforward thing’ by labelling a text pro- or anti-Augustan,54 we need to allow for a complexity of attitudes towards society and politics across the breadth of Augustan artists, who should be seen as actively advancing and molding – rather than merely reflecting or passively recording – newly emerging ideas of self and state during this period.

  Still, as many critics have argued, the very subject matter of love poetry seems uniquely poised to challenge conventional values. Lyne points out that in the Pro Sestio ‘Cicero vilifies an idle society of pleasure in terms that sound very like a jaundiced and malevolent representation of the world we see reflected in Catullus’ poems.’55 Augustan elegy would go even further in establishing its own ‘alternative social creed’, ‘explicitly advocating a life of leisure, love, and pleasure to the exclusion of conventional masculine pursuits – law, politics, and the military’.56 In effect, by elevating love over traditional occupations, elegy seems to challenge the very ideals of Augustan Rome, including the demands it placed on the male citizen, thumbing its nose at Augustan moral reform and treating the pursuit of desire as an opening for civic dissent. In doing so, love poetry raises fundamental questions about the very nature of Roman masculinity.

  Gender Trouble?

  The Latin term virtus (‘manliness’ or ‘excellence’) was derived from the term vir (‘man’) and was ‘a term heavy with moral significance for Roman writers’.57 In fact, ‘Roman men and ancient Roman custom’ were considered the ‘foundations of the res Romana (“the Roman state,” or perhaps “Romanness”)’,58 furnishing the elements that supposedly made Rome superior to its rivals. Among upper-class Roman men especially, the links between masculinity and self-control were crucial since the ‘capacity for self-control legitimated the control they exercised over others who were, it was implied, unable to control themselves’.59 Notably, such assumptions about domination were used to construct parallel hierarchies in Roman thought pertaining to both gender and imperial relations.

  The ‘failure’ of masculinity was often linked to specific allegatio
ns of mollitia or ‘softness’ in Roman discourse,‌60 and ‘soft’ or ‘effeminate’ Roman men were considered dangerous precisely because they were thought to demonstrate ‘political, social and moral weakness’.‌61 Like Octavian, Cicero damaged Mark Antony’s reputation in Rome by accusing him of a range of effeminate behaviours, not least that he allowed the women in his life to dominate him.‌62 Not content to single out only one wife, Cicero alleged a long habit of subservience, professing memorably that Antony’s earlier wife, Fulvia, had ‘broken him in’ (Plutarch, Antony 10) for Cleopatra.‌63 Yet sources also suggest that Maecenas was considered effeminate by his contemporaries,‌64 so that the male performance of gender, reliant as it was on the perception of others (not to mention its intersections with class) could be both unstable and ambiguous.

  As Greene observes, ‘the instability of Roman “masculinity” is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the amatory texts of Roman poets,’‌65 works that often celebrate the male ego’s patent loss of control in love. Catullus’ poetry presents ‘a multifaceted and complex performance of “Roman manhood”’,‌66 while Propertius’ embodiment of masculine subjectivity seems at times ambivalent and, at others, wracked by insecurity. Mollitia and its related vocabulary, such as mollis (‘soft’), abound in love poetry; in fact, the terminology of ‘softness’ and ‘lightness’ is often used to describe love poetry itself, drawing a strong correlation between the male poet and his ‘soft’ poetic style. Conversely, references to the puella as dura or ‘hard’ (e.g. Propertius 1.15.1) signal a dangerously complementary inversion of traditional gender roles, a topic we shall explore further in Chapter 3.

  Beyond challenging traditional ideas of gender, the love poets manufactured a distinct vocabulary for representing erotic relations, one that at times appropriated and redefined major concepts in Roman life. Such manoeuvres display the love poets’ at times paradoxical relation to conventional Roman values, for as one scholar writes of Propertius, ‘he poses as an anti-establishment figure, but is only able to express himself in the language of the society he claims to distance himself from.’67

  Setting New Terms

  Throughout his poetry, Catullus appropriates a series of terms that were loaded with significance for the Romans, terms such as fides (‘trustworthiness’), foedus (‘pact’), officium (‘duty’) and pietas (‘dutifulness’);68 his inventive use of amicitia (‘friendship’), in particular, has garnered scholarly attention given that it seems to equate Catullus’ erotic bond with Lesbia to that of the obligations between upper-class men.69 The elegists, in turn, actively promoted leisure over employment, otium over negotium. Tibullus in his opening poem, for example, expressly admits that he wants to embrace an idle life without negotium, leaving it to others (namely Messalla) to pursue wealth or military glory (1.1.1–4). In the same vein, the Augustan elegists embraced the idea of nequitia (‘worthlessness’), a life of degradation and deviance that repudiated the civic duty of a freeborn citizen. Thus, in the opening poem of the second book of the Amores, Ovid proudly calls himself ‘a poet of worthlessness’ (2.1.2; see also Propertius 2.24.6).

  The Augustan elegists likewise reclaimed the role of soldier by using a literary figure known as the militia amoris (‘the military service of love’), a trope that was both powerful and malleable. For one, the elegists used it to declare both their preference for the role of lover over soldier and their related preference for writing about love rather than war, often casting love itself as a kind of warfare. In his programmatic opening poem, Tibullus declares that in the brawls of love he ‘is a general and a steadfast soldier’ (1.1.75); Propertius similarly announces that he is not worthy of glory or weaponry (1.6.29–30) but that love is his battlefield (see also 2.1.45–46). Adopting an even more loaded framework, Propertius asserts in another poem that a night with Cynthia provides a ‘greater victory than the Parthians’ (2.14.23).70 Ovid eventually takes the figure of militia amoris to its limits, demonstrating the many parallels between lovers and soldiers with an elaborate and showy series of comparisons in Amores 1.9.71

  Much like Stoppard in the epigraph that opens the chapter, Conte has suggested that there is an ‘elegiac ideology’ that underlies Augustan love poetry, one that distinguishes it from other forms. At the centre of that ideological system stands ‘the conception of the love-poet as a slave – of his beloved, his passion, his incurable weakness, and ultimately his own poetry’.72 We want, then, to conclude our chapter with a final trope that illustrates love poetry’s complex engagement with its Roman historical context: love as a form of enslavement.

  Excursus: ‘Slaves of Love’

  Although Greek literature uses the idea of slavery, the condition generally does not derive from a romantic attachment. When slavery is used to illuminate erotic desire in classical Greek and later Alexandrian literature, ‘it connotes primarily the power of love, rather than the lover’s humility and abasement.’73 The Latin love poets subsequently adopted and expanded the notion of servitium amoris (‘slavery of love’) in ways that were unprecedented, using it in large part to communicate a ‘state or sense of degradation’.74 In effect, by casting themselves as slaves to love – or to the puella herself – the love poets erode the privileges of their own masculinity by assigning themselves to the lowest possible rung of society while forfeiting the rights of a freeborn Roman citizen. Moreover, since the male body was generally inviolate in Roman law and custom, the male ego’s role-playing as a slave – a role defined by the complete loss of control over one’s own body75 – allowed him to extend even further his departure from the norms of masculinity.

  Catullus refers to the idea of love as slavery on a number of occasions,76 but it appears much more prominently in elegy. Summing up his life, Propertius gloomily requests that his epitaph read: ‘the one who now lies as horrible dust was once the slave of a single love’ (2.13.35–36). Ovid, on the other hand, gleefully proposes that ‘if there is anyone who thinks it disgraceful to be the slave of a girl, I will be judged disgraceful by that person!’ (Amores 2.17.1–2), while Tibullus despondently proclaims ‘here I see slavery and a mistress well-prepared for me; goodbye, then, that freedom of my fathers. Sad slavery is given to me; I am held in chains and Amor never releases wretched me from shackles’ (2.4.1–4). As Murgatroyd points out, the emphasis on slavery’s physical restraints was a ‘novel idea’ of the elegists,77 and there is no question that the literary device acquires its potency and, indeed, its density of meaning from the fact that Rome was itself a slave-holding society, one that utilized brutality and violence as a primary method of control.78

  But we might go even further by considering how the encounter with real slaves in love poetry sheds light on the love poets’ use of the device to showcase their own ostensible powerlessness. Faced with Cynthia’s fury in 4.8, Propertius markedly refuses to intervene on the slave Lygdamus’ behalf, claiming he is no less captive (70), but the hollowness of this conceit is soon revealed by the respective punishments Cynthia dictates for each man.79 Lygdamus also appears in 3.6 as Propertius begs him for an account of what he saw and heard from Cynthia, a request that highlights what William Fitzgerald has called the ‘symbiotic relationship of master and slave’,80 one in which Lygdamus is asked literally to stand in for Propertius’ eyes and ears. Reminding Lygdamus of his own limitations, the poem concludes with Propertius’ dubious claim that he will help Lygdamus obtain his freedom if the two lovers are reconciled (41–42). In the Amores, Ovid similarly addresses a slave named Bagoas in two adjacent poems (2.2 and 2.3), a eunuch who, Ovid accuses, guards his mistress Corinna much too closely. Seeking to prevent Bagoas from telling Corinna’s husband, the slave’s master, about Corinna’s infidelity, Ovid at one point brutally reminds the slave of the disparate punishments that await any disclosure: ‘Why would you enter an unequal contest? Caught out, there are lashes for you, while she sits in the lap of the judge’ (2.2.61–62).81

  As these scenarios indicate, despite any pretence that th
ey stand as slaves in the arena of love, the love poets do not hesitate to exercise their authority over real slaves, dangling promises of freedom or, conversely, threatening torture and punishment. So, too, ego’s relationship to slaves is often triangulated through the puella,82 and Ovid exploits the tension between all three subject positions – ego, puella and slave – in Amores 2.7 and 2.8 when he presents Corinna’s maid, Cypassis, as her sexual rival. Having denied that he had any sexual contact with Cypassis in 2.7, Ovid proceeds in 2.8 to demand as ‘price’ for his ‘service’ (his denials to Corinna) that Cypassis have sex with him again (21–22). Professing that ‘it is enough to have pleased one master’, Ovid threatens to tell Corinna everything if Cypassis does not submit (23–28).83

  Such representations of slavery underline the serious stakes involved in love poetry for many of its participants. Yet, in responding to Ovid’s verbal coercion, one scholar writes:

  Taking advantage of a slave’s vulnerability is not a very pretty kind of intimidation, and that we are not offended by it in either Amores II.3 or II.8 indicates how skilfully Ovid’s wit and humour have removed both encounters from the stereotyped reality of the literary love affair.84

  Such reaction testifies well to the propensity among modern scholars for treating Ovid’s poetry as predominantly ‘playful’ or ‘light-hearted’. That certain readers are ‘not offended’ by such a passage reveals well the painstaking ways in which Ovid builds trust with his audience, encouraging the reader to identify with his ego and so unconsciously accept the values and attitudes he promulgates. Such a tight bond between narrator and audience clearly requires further unpacking – and so we turn now to the question of love poetry’s ego, exploring more fully the myriad ways that first person narration encourages identification and even collaboration from the reader.